Living Inside the Box

0.cached.png

By Newsweek

See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.

In sixth grade, I lived in a cardboard box. It wasn't your typical box, but a triangle made of two attached sections positioned against the classroom wall, leaving an opening so that I could go in and out. I loved my box. It was dim and private inside, but it wasn't structurally sound. Every so often my little cardboard house would collapse, and I would have to set it up all over again.

Everyone else in the class had a box, too, but theirs were real ones that didn't fall down when someone brushed against them. I had joined the class late, and had to make do with leftovers. The first day I walked into the classroom at the elementary school in Goleta, Calif., was like entering a miniature village, a random gathering of small tan houses with little people sitting in open doorways. It was about as far as you could get from traditional rows of school desks, or even the circular formation that up-to-date teachers used. Ours was an ordinary public school, but with an energetic young principal who encouraged teachers to be creative. Midway through the school year—this was early 1972—a new teacher arrived to start an experimental morning class in the portable classroom across from the organic garden. My mother, figuring a change would keep from getting bored, signed me up—along with, it turned out, the problem kids that other teachers had decided to farm out. The most trouble I had ever given anyone at school was when I informed the administration that I wasn't learning enough and so needed to skip third grade. But here I was in the experimental classroom, in my own little box. The teacher, a gentle, slender young woman, visited each of us in our sanctuaries to go over the schoolwork we were doing at our own pace. I didn't bother the other kids, and the other kids didn't bother me. Well, except for Richard. For some mysterious reason, he would sing the latest Melanie song in a high, whiny voice every time he saw me: "Well, I got a brand new pair of roller skates, you got a brand new key." I was mortified. So I spent the mornings sitting in my box or on the field outside the classroom, writing stories and poems. I drew pictures in my journal of the mountains that rose blue in the distance beyond the playground. Sometimes I left the class room to rehearse "Twelfth Night," directed by university students, in which I played an awkward Mariah. Other days I joined a group of students who met with a linguist from the university to learn how language worked. Each afternoon I returned to my regular classroom, where things were more conventional than in the cardboard village, but still in a 1970s California sort of way. For weeks, we spent math class counting, sorting and grouping thousands of strange bottle caps that the local 7Up bottling plant had given the school. I never figured out why we were sorting them, but the caps were smooth and it felt good to plunge my arm down in to them and grab a handful. Sometimes the teacher, who had long brown hair and drove a mustard-colored Karmann Ghia convertible, would sit in front of the class room and read to us. When she read "A Wrinkle in Time," she captured perfectly the quaver in Mrs. Which's voice. "The Hobbit" came next. Still when I think of that book I can hear her hiss, in Gollum's voice, "My preciousss ..." What surprises me now is not that she read those books to us, but that she had the time to do so. My own children, growing up 30 years later on the other side of the country, have hurried through each school year since they entered all-day kindergarten, their teachers racing to cover material that will appear on the government-required test at year's end. My fifth grader knows the periodic table and how to build an electric circuit; she carries an agenda book for her homework assignments. My eighth grader is learning geometry, which I didn't study until two years later, and plays the flute better than I did at the end of high school. There are certainly benefits to this fast track. But there's not much time to breathe. At the end of sixth grade, we dismantled our cardboard houses. The next year I started leaving home early in the morning to take the school bus to junior high. I had six different classes with six different teachers, two locker combinations to memorize and homework every night. Until I finished high school, that's how things went—routine replacing experimentation. My months in a cardboard box receded in to my memory, a fulcrum between elementary school and what lay beyond. It didn't matter that I hadn't learned much in sixth grade that could be demonstrated on a standardized test. Instead, I had time to explore, to read, to write and to think. I look back on that as a gift. Russell lives in Charlottesville, Va.

Read More on News